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Why? – Part 5

What I have written this week can be seen as a rant. It is the rant of a frustrated Indian who sees the future slipping away. It is the rant of a citizen who would like to act but doesn’t know where to start and what to do.

There is a way out. Three generations of apathy, bad economic policies and collective stupidity have brought us here. But, a generation of hard work can change the course of our nation. It will require some of us to sacrifice professional careers and thriving businesses to take up a cause that is the most important challenge facing us – rebuilding our nation.

We need to create an India that is not just rich and developed, but also one where nationalism and good character reigns in its citizens. We have lost out on the 20- and 30-somethings. But the young and those yet to be born are the ones which are our hope. Some of us have to rise above the ordinariness of daily life so we can build a nation our children are proud of.

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Parents (i.e the 30’s) influence both the practices and representations of their children (i.e the young). the questions is not who?, but how are we going to infuse these values, while we still fight ourselves against the ordinariness of daily life…

Nice to know that Rajesh resides on a different planet. He acts like an adolescent fuming at his parents, to his eyes, his parents seem wrong in every aspect of their lives and decision making.

It is only when the ball is passed to them as adults that they understand the reasoning behind their parents decision and appreciate their parents foresight. Once the shoe is on his foot, as he expects it to be, let us see how he acts.

True, that there are a hell a lot of things that are wrong with India, but then a lot of things are going right, if not at the right speed.

The economy is picking up, so is infrastructure, compared to the stasis of the seventies and the eighties there is definitely an improvement in life style and consumption.

True that there are people still below the poverty line, true that there are problems that are the result of particular policy and political trajectories, but it is unrealistic that in a democratic polity that these things can be sorted out with one grand move or another.

Governance is not as fast paced as Rajesh and Co would wish it to be, and fast changes only unsettle the population.

It is also the characteristic of all economies that some people will be poor, paraphrasing Tolstoy, poor, but in different ways. The poor man in the US drinks Coke, a luxury still for many Indians.

India’s biggest problem in the seventies was how to run a closed (read self reliant) economy and still feed its citizens, much of the challenge has been met, if in haphazard fashion.

The challenges now are a trifle different, and are more about infrastructure and carrying the laggards along.

The Indian economy is independent enough to set its own trajectory, there is little by way of licensing in industry compared to the olden days. The bribe taking continues and some sustained activism on that count will help shrink it to a manageable basis.

On the whole there is a sense of optimism, notice that despite inflationary pressures, the people are managing, and as long as inflation does not spurt into double digits as happened recently with food, the people will go along.

If you want a market economy, if you want to allow derivatives trading in commodities, then these sharps ups and downs are inevitable.

When people are too intent on private profit, the public good suffers, a good lesson for those still perched insistently on the rightist agenda.

Same will happen when the government looks to unduly profit, the cost of the auction in 3G will play out in the next few years, as telecom companies close or merge, unable to meet the costs of operations. We can expect to be back to a few cross linked polypolies.

As to the scams and the black money, I think that no party in India is immune to it. Mahajan, PBUH, did show the BJP the way, and if contemporary accounts were right, they did take to it like a duck to water.

Good governance is a thing that the Indian public and polity are getting used to, the rungs are being raised, and not only in the BJP ruled states.

To harp on more and speedy good governance is merely stating the obvious.